"I-stroke-we have been given many names..." Twitter's just reminded me, it was four years ago today that the first of Time Spanner's two episodes were broadcast (still hearable here, shush). I've already written a little about the fug I got into trying to decide exactly what to call Belinda Stewart-Wilson's pan-dimensional inhabitant of the Fons et Origo, or "Heaven". Producer Gareth decided upon "Angel", which made a lot of sense, but did risk ruling out the possibility she might be God. I was tickled therefore, and probably a little jealous, when I came to watch Soul, and saw that its own dimensionally difficult inhabitants of an Afterlife-cum-Source-of-all-Inspiration had managed to cut through all this theological faff by just calling each other "Jerry". I also liked that the Jerrys were composed of a single line. If you're going to try to visualise a non-religious Heaven, mathematics seems a pleasing place to start, and I spent quite a bit of the film trying to work out why (beyond the cuteness of bureaucracy).
In 1887, B. W. Betts tried to model the evolution of human psychology through pure geometry, although he maybe didn't try that hard. (More here).
Paradise is another word for Garden... I'd also just been rewatching The Crown*, and remembered how Prince Charles, nosing around his new estate in Highgrove, had said "there are no straight lines in Nature." But if that's the case, I suddenly thought, how do you know where something will land when you drop it? Thanks to gravity, if we could perceive the world in four dimensions, we'd see that Nature is actually full of straight lines. And ellipses, and perfect geometric figures, and maybe that's what's so pleasing about these images: not their simplicity, but their powers of prophecy. And maybe, then, that's the kind of thing we'd hope to see in Heaven, especially if we weren't waiting to see God.
* (Olivia Colman speaks quickly. Elizabeth II speaks slowly. It's taken me two series to realise my one problem with it.)
All this talk about geometry and pan-dimensionality somehow reminded me of Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott, in which a Sphere manifests itself into a two-dimensional world as a herald of the Revelation of the Third Dimension (or something along those lines, at any rate) and the protagonist Square immediately proceeds to address it in the following manner: "Monster," I shrieked, "be thou juggler, enchanter, dream, or devil, no more will I endure thy mockeries. Either thou or I must perish."
ReplyDelete(Incidentally, I love how unfazed about the whole Heaven business Martin Gay seems to be - never mind the fiery Angel wreathed in fire, all he cares about is finding out when his phone call to Gabbie got cut off. And even later, when he claims he's an atheist right to Bridget's face, sort of implying you can't take seriously an Heaven that's full of robots.)
In other news, I'm still trying to figure out the code/hidden meaning/reason for picking 257 as Kraken's magic number for opening the portal between his scrying glass and Heaven, but apart from the fact that 257 is a Fermat prime, and the 257-gon is therefore a constructible polygon using compass and straightedge, I've got nothing. (By some weird coincidence though, YouTube's been recommending me this video concerning the Riemann Hypothesis, which involves both prime numbers and imaginary numbers, and while I can't say I understood everything that was said, it was still fascinating.)
Absolutely loving the mathematical sculptures from the video at the end of your post, by the way. There's always something 'magical' about finding hidden patterns in the world around us, be them mathematical, geometrical, or repetitions in time.
Brilliant link. Thank you!
ReplyDeleteI can safely say that I will never divulge the secret of 257.
The final video has very little to do with what I was actually writing about but is included, yeah, for its prettiness.